With Barry Flanagan: Travels Through Time and Spain

By Richard McNeff

With Barry Flanagan is a vivid account of a friendship that evolved into a working relationship when Richard McNeff became ‘spontaneous fixer’ (Flanagan’s description) of the sculptor’s show held in June 1992 at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Ibiza, where they were both living. McNeff was to gain a privileged insight into the sculptor’s singular personality and eccentric working methods, learning to decipher his memorably surreal turns of phrase and to parry his fascinating, if at times unsettling, pranksteresque quirks. In September 1992 Flanagan and McNeff took the show to Majorca, resulting in a lively visit to the celebrated Spanish artist Miquel Barcelo. The following year McNeff was involved in Flanagan’s print-making venture in Barcelona and in his Madrid retrospective. Flanagan rescued him from a rough landing in England in 1994 by commissioning a tour of stone quarries there.Subsequently McNeff ran into a fourteen-year-old profoundly deaf girl who turned out to be his unknown daughter. She had a talent for art and the generous sculptor was instrumental in helping with her studies. Late in 2008 Barry was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. By June 2009 he was wheelchair-bound. Two months later he died, and McNeff read the lesson at his funeral. Fleshed out with biographical detail, much of it supplied by the sculptor himself, this touching memoir is the first retrospective of a major Welsh-born artist. Photographs of him as well as of his drawings and sculpture fully complement the text. With Barry Flanagan captures the spirit of this remarkable Merlinesque figure in a moving portrait that reveals a true original.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Lilliput Press
• Release date: Nov 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781843513902

Book preview

Table of Contents

Frontispiece

Title page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Photo credits

Preface

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Notes

Appendix

Further reading

References

Articles

A note on the author

Copyright

flanagan_front_cover.tif00-Frontispiece.eps

Self Portrait, 1981, Charcoal and watercolour on paper, 15 x 10 1/2 / 38.1cm x 26.7cm

WITH BARRY FLANAGAN

TRAVELS THROUGH TIME AND SPAIN

Richard McNeff

The Lilliput Press | Dublin

For Mandana

Omar.tif

From The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

ubu_sketch.tif

Ubu sketch, 1974, 3 7/16 x 5 1/4 / 8.8cm x 13.4cm

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been published without the help and input of Jo Melvin (the Estate of Barry Flanagan) and Vivienne Guinness, and I would like to thank the following for their encouragement: Enrique Juncosa, Oengus MacNamara, Sarah Munn, Robert Nurden, Tony Peake, Elena Ruiz Sastre, Jessica Sturgess, Kevin Whitney; and at the foundry, Henry Abercrombie (‘Ab’), Jerry Hughes and Mark Jones. I thank Antonio Colinas for permission to use his poem ‘Head of the Goddess in my Hands’ (‘Cabeza de la diosa entre mis manos’) and Helga Watson Todd for permission to reproduce ‘Games’, a poem by her late husband Martin Watson Todd. I thank Miquel Barceló for allowing the use of his portrait of Barry Flanagan. Thanks also to Djinn von Noorden for her assistance with the editing and Antony Farrell at The Lilliput Press.

PHOTO CREDITS

The Estate of Barry Flanagan courtesy Plubronze Limited

Hugh Gordon

Mark Jones

Vivienne Guinness

Gaudier Deblonde

Kevin Scanlan

Hugh Lane City Gallery

Andre Morin

Some time ago There was a 2 man show

with Marcel ... And it has always bothered

me that Ibiza Museum was considered not

worthy to be notified in the stream of events.

It was curated by Richard McNeff

& to know about it would be a propper [sic] thing.

(Email from Barry Flanagan to Galerie Lelong, Paris,

25 November 2008)

PREFACE

What follows is an account of time spent with Barry Flanagan from 1987, when we first met, to 2009 when he sadly passed away. This account focuses especially on the exhibition he put on at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Ibiza in 1992, which we then took to Palma, Mallorca, as well as describing his interests in Madrid, Barcelona and England. Most of these doings have been bypassed in the standard chronologies. This work has been undertaken in order to rectify this, and to give an insight into a remarkable man and artist.

1

Half an hour after leaving Palma, the mountains of the west coast of Mallorca rose before us. Barry was at the wheel of the hire car, staring fixedly at the steepening road ahead, which was lined on either side by ever-taller hills. Still embarrassed by the nervousness the traffic of the unfamiliar city had induced in me and by my reluctance to drive, I now offered to take the wheel whenever Barry wished.

‘I’d rather stick with it if you don’t mind,’ the sculptor responded.

We carried on ascending through a landscape that was now mountainous and exhilarating. I could not understand why Barry was applying all his concentration to the unfolding road and ignoring such spectacular views. In the end I asked him.

‘I find being dwarfed by mountains unsettling,’ he explained.

‘The opposite of vertigo,’ I suggested, and then one of us coined the word ‘invertigo’ to describe this.

It was the first time that morning we had laughed. Thinking about it later, however, the words tallied with something Monica, the sculptor’s mother, had told me. Barry had been born in 1941, a year after his father Bill’s employer, Warner Brothers, had arranged the evacuation of his two older brothers and elder sister to North America.

‘If you want to understand Barry,’ Monica had said, ‘you have to realize he was the centre of attention until he was five. Then suddenly Patsy, Mike and John came back and grabbed all the limelight. He never got over it.’

This was a key to Barry’s nature: a keen resentment of being dwarfed by mountains, older siblings or anything or anybody else for that matter. This led him to raise himself through work and deed, until he became a sort of giant. Allied to this was his hatred of being ignored, patronized or taken for granted. Any one of these transgressed the ‘civility’ he was so fond of citing and could provoke the storm he was to warn me at my peril to avoid.

*

I first saw Barry at a wedding reception at Es Figueral on the north coast of Ibiza in 1987, the year he moved to the island. I was there because Kika, my partner, had been invited by Renate, Barry’s partner. Barry was wearing a shabby blue-grey denim suit and a cap, which resembled those worn by ticket inspectors on East European trains. He had an alert fine-featured face, hair just starting to silver at the back and sides, and a face speckled with freckles. Kika told me he was an artist and I assumed he must be another skint bohemian drawn to the island by its congenial climate, tolerant locals and, in those pre-Euro days, hospitable prices. It was only later I heard on the bush telegraph that Barry was actually a figure with an international reputation, an artist-star in our meteor-filled sky. He had met Renate in London, running into her in Cork Street when she was an art student. They had had a son together, Alfred, and then moved to Ibiza where Renate’s parents had been living for several years. Annabelle, their daughter, was born on Ibiza. Barry delivered her himself.

I did not talk with Barry that day but registered him as a vague figure on the fringe of things, much how I felt myself. A little while later he came to a reading some friends and I were giving in a laundrette in San Juan. He spoke to me afterwards and seemed quite animated by the passages from a work in progress I had read to the audience. I found it difficult to understand what he was saying. Nevertheless, the fact he had liked what he heard may explain my next encounter with him, a few days before Christmas, when two bottles appeared on Kika’s table at the Royalty, the main café in Santa Eulalia. Their origin was a mystery: Kika had gone to the ladies and found them waiting for her on her return. The consensus was that Barry was the source. His generosity, particularly in the provision of food and drink, was already passing into legend. One bottle was of Hennessy Cognac, the other a fine Russian vodka. We took them home and drank most of their contents in the company of two friends.

01-Kika.eps

Kika, c.1990, Pen on paper, 11 10/16 x 8 1/4 / 29.5cm x 21cm

Kika was tall and slender, sometimes worryingly so. She was a great beauty, fêted in the carousel of Ibiza nightlife, until one winter she was flung off and went on the slide. She had the soul of a clown and sometimes dressed as one. One day when she was sick, I met Barry in town and he came back with me to the house to visit her. He had a small sketchbook with him and sat down by the bed and immediately began drawing her profile. He was using a pen and as was usual for him the nib hardly ever left the sheet of paper as he traced her straight nose and prominent lips with an uninterrupted line. His shoulders were hunched as he worked and the furious concentration that possessed him made me wonder if there was something shamanic in this act: it was as though by sketching he hoped to draw out her pain. When he had finished, he tore the sheet out and gave it to her.

At this time I was renting a house about a mile along the coast from Santa Eulalia at a place called Niu Blau. A creek separated the house from a snug, pine-shaded beach where there was a restaurant, whose owner, Juanito, was my landlord. The house had three tiny rooms, a kitchen and a shower. A path came up from the creek and made a right angle, running past the house and then alongside the forest in front of it. At night the only sound was the sea, the ebb and flow of waves that lulled you to sleep. There was a porch outside and a small garden I had made of geraniums, roses and jasmine, which was divided by a path of pebbles gathered from the beach. The geraniums blossomed through the year.

Niu Blau meant the Blue Nest in Ibicenco, and had been the name given to his studio by Rigoberto Soler, an artist who painted there in the 1930s. One Sunday we had a visit from Barry and Renate. It was a windy day, and leaving the ladies in the house, the sculptor and I went for a stroll up along the path to the headland. There was a crumbling wall of reddish stone to one side behind which lived Mariano, the old fisherman, in a house that was formerly a boat shed. Further up, in a splendidly located but simple house, whose erection would be forbidden today by the Law of Coasts, dwelt an affable if slightly cantankerous American, who was one of the founding fathers of the foreign community on Ibiza and had run a school on the island in the 1960s. We visited neither of them but instead observed the way strong gusts from the choppy sea were bending the trees along the coast.

‘You know what’s happening, don’t you?‘ said Barry.

The sea was rough, the wind was high, that much I was aware of.

‘The wind is baffled by the pines.’

Barry explained this in a stilted way that did not seem to invite reply. This, coupled with a growing awe I felt for him, made me silent, a state difficult for me as I am by nature garrulous, uncomfortable with pauses and duty-bound to break them. Barry was wearing a green corduroy jacket, baggy tweed trousers and a collarless striped shirt. There was jerkiness to his movements and at one point he turned and took in the salty air through flared nostrils, looking very much the hare as he did so. I was intrigued by him and by his visit, wondering if it had been inspired by anything more than Renate and Kika’s friendship.

It had.

‘I have a commission for you,’ Barry declared when the four of us were back in the tiny sitting room. We were drinking the last of the Hennessy (I was too abashed to ask if it had come from him). ‘I wish you to produce a piece of writing. The subject matter and deadline are entirely of your choosing.’

I was at that time working on an historical novel, which had been triggered by a remark I had come across in a book by a Spanish writer about the Balearic islands. According to L. Pericot Garcia, the Romans had looked on Ibiza as the setting for a ‘sweet and honeyed life’, or la dolce vita as we call it today. Just as now, so in the first century AD there had been a raffish, hedonistic community composed of rich expatriates, criminals and artists.

In order to supply background, I used to go to the small municipal library in Ibiza town and research the history of the island in antiquity, drawing mainly from the work of a priest and antiquarian called Isidor Macabich. I read accounts of how the Greeks who fought at Troy had been shipwrecked on the beaches of Ibiza and lived out their days entirely naked, perfecting their sling-throwing skills. The Phoenicians had populated the island, establishing the city of Ibiza in 654 bc, and the island’s name probably derived from a war god called Bes. It seemed a simple matter to put my research notes together, type them into something resembling a coherent text, and call this ‘The Island of Bes’. The next time Kika saw Renate in town she mentioned that the commission was ready. The following Sunday Barry showed up at the house with Flan, the flame-haired daughter of his first marriage, in tow. I handed him the piece, which I had typed out on my old Olivetti. It consisted of five A4 sheets of double-spaced text. Barry perused it with great concentration for a few minutes. Then he turned to me and, with a sharp, not particularly friendly expression on his face, asked me what I wanted for it.

I knew commission meant money, and the word was the key to most of Barry’s dealings. I had made almost nothing from a writing career that up to that time had spanned twenty years; indeed, if you factored in postage and ink, the balance was firmly in the red. On the other hand, life on Ibiza then was cheap and time-friendly, and the money1 I made from teaching added up to just enough to pay the rent, run an old banger, dawdle in the sun drinking coffee and eat numerous menus del día. It seemed churlish to cadge money for something that had been a pleasure, not a chore.

‘I want you to have it,‘ I grandly declared. ‘We are fellow artists and money should not be an issue.’

‘So you don’t want anything,‘ said Barry by way of confirmation, in a tone that implied he was not as happy as I expected with this arrangement.

I thought no more about it until I ran into him in Pomelo’s, a bar frequented by expats beside the new market in Santa Eulalia. He was drinking whisky and water from a tall glass at the bar. I went and joined him, noticing the liver spots dotted across his hand as he swirled the liquid round in the glass. I ordered a carajillo for myself (a small black coffee with brandy).

‘I am sorry you saw fit to refuse my commission,’ he announced. He then reached into the inner pocket of his jacket, drew out a brown leather wallet and extracted two pristine ten-thousand peseta1 notes of the new blue variety. ‘Robin, however, has shown me the courtesy of accepting it. Would you be so good as to give this to him?’

I was too stung to say anything. Feeling foolish, I took the money and did indeed deliver it to Robin, who was living in a house not far from my own between the Es Canar and San Carlos roads. Apart from being aspiring writers, Robin and I had a lot in common, having first bumped into each other in the underground scene centred round the psychedelic heartlands of Portobello Road and the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, in the late 1960s. It was quite common for me to come across people I had known from that time on Ibiza or meet others linked to it. Along with Goa and Amsterdam, the island was still one of the key bastions of the hippies’ last stand, a Bermuda Triangle in which dreams and ideals were vanishing by the planeload.

Robin knew Barry had commissioned me as well. We were in a race, but I had never heard the starting gun.

‘Barry likes games,’ Robin said. ‘He’s playing one with you. Don’t you see what he’s trying to tell you?’

I had some inkling. ‘To be a bit more businesslike,’ I ventured, ‘and forget all this wishy-washy, brother-artist stuff.’

‘Precisely,’ said Robin.

‘I could stomach that, but giving me the dosh to give to you is really rubbing my nose in it.’

‘It will make your nose harder,’ said Robin.

Some time later another interpretation of Barry’s action suggested itself. Through not playing by his rules, I had robbed him of control and this was something he did not like. Before moving to Ibiza